Steven Levy writes an interesting article for Wired magazine's February issue called The Burden of Twitter.
He talks about the responsibility he feels to keep up with his numerous blogs, twitter posts, Facebook status updates and the like while also feeling some sense of worry that he is sharing too much of his life with people he doesn't even know.
Says Steven:
Because of time constraints and just plain reticence, I worry that I'm snatching morsels from the information food bank without making any donations. Instead of healthy, reciprocal participation, I'm flirting with parasitic voyeurism.So, driven by guilt, I try to pitch in. I post Facebook status reports, send iPhone snapshots to Flickr, link my Netflix queue with FriendFeed. But as my participation increases, I invariably suffer another psychic downside of social networking: remorse.
The more I upload the details of my existence, even in the form of random observations and casual location updates, the more I worry about giving away too much. It's one thing to share intimacies person-to-person. But with a community? Creepy.
The point he ultimately makes is one that, I think, deserves some discourse:
We hear a lot about privacy violations by Big Brother and Little Brother. But what if the fault lies not in our siblings but in ourselves?
Interesting paradox, don't you think?
1 comment:
See, I don't see it as paradoxical, as anything private I want to relinquish is my right to do so. There is no moral equivalence between my releasing my own details and having it extracted from me by the nanny state.
-R
Post a Comment